Unfortunately its customer care team wasn’t quite as sharp, and had to issue a quick apology after failing to stop a pre-scheduled tweet, saying: "It's sleepy time so we're off to hit the hay. See you at 8am for more #TescoTweets".

Burger King

Burger King lost control of its Twitter feeds after being hacked by an unknown group. The hackers changed Burger King's logo and profile name to McDonald’s, before tweeting that the company had been bought out by its competitor.

It then took a turn for the worse, with tweets about Burger King employees taking drugs and other offensive material.

The company regained control of the feed shortly afterwards and reset the password. Unfortunately the hackers weren’t finished, and swiftly replaced Jeep’s logo on its Twitter feed with a Cadillac symbol.

HMV

HMV’s mistake wasn’t that it tweeted something offensive, but that it forgot who held the keys to its Twitter feed.

The troubled retailer was forced to layoff thousands of staff after going into administration earlier this year, which annoyed a lot of its employees.

Using the hashtag #hmvXFactorFiring the employee first announced that a “mass execution” was taking place, before revealing that the marketing director had a limited knowledge of social media and that the Twitter account was initially established by an unpaid intern.

Jamie Oliver

Healthy eating campaigner Jamie Oliver has had his Twitter account hacked by people advertising a quick-fix diet.

A series of messages were sent out from the official account of the celebrity chef claiming that up to 22lbs of fat could be lost in less than a month, and linking to a website.

He spotted the mistake within minutes and deleted the messages, adding: “Whoa sorry guys looks like i got hacked!! Sorry to all looking in to it now. JOXX”

Whilst many tweeted to warn him about the security breach, pointing out that such an endorsement was “unlike” him, others used opportunity to poke fun.

Luke Lewis wrote: “Jamie Oliver's tweets are more lucid than usual this morning.”

Pepper Pig

Children visiting the Facebook page of television character Peppa Pig were told to "go to hell" after hackers posted a series of abusive updates.

Several spam links and pictures were uploaded onto the social networking page, which more than 130,000 people had 'liked', leading to scores of complaints from parents that their children could see the posts.

The hacking led some people to question whether children should be using the social networking site despite Facebook not allowing anyone under the age of 13 to have a profile.